“Yeah, I guess,” Neil said.
“This is a very beautiful city, very rich, historically, you know. Napoleon passed through Vilnius on the way to his great defeat. There is a small monument there. On the side you see when you are facing east, it says, ‘Napoleon Bonaparte passed this way in 1812 with 400,000 men.’ From the other direction it says, ‘Napoleon passed this way in 1812 with 9,000 men.’ In fact, many of them froze to death just outside the city gates. A terrible winter, 1812. But this time of year the climate in Vilnius is very nice.”
“Have you been there?” Neil asked.
“Oh yes. I have one very good friend there, a professor at the university. Kazys Uzdavinys.” Professor Piot signaled the bartender for the check. “He wrote a lovely paper on the dental findings from the bodies of the Napoleonic conscripts. I’m sure you can stay with him for a few days.”
“In Vilnius?” Neil asked.
“Of course. Perhaps you would like to go and tell this girl what it was you wanted to say.”
“Mm,” Neil said, and he was going to explain how actually he didn’t really know her very well, he didn’t know where in Vilnius she lived, and that even if he did know, there was a major difference between imagining how things would go if he were to show up on her doorstep unannounced and actually doing it. But Professor Piot had got hold of one of his favorite subjects, which was advising his students to live lives of impractical adventure, and it was hard to get a word in.
“One must do such things, you know,” Professor Piot was saying. “I myself once made such a completely crazy trip when I was about your age, to a far off wilderness called Chicago. And in the end it all was shit, but you know, if I had not done it, well, it wouldn’t be a life, and that’s the way it is. For the sake of those historians of the future we must live our lives today.”
“I know, I know,” Neil said.
“And we must make them interesting.”
“I know,” Neil said. Professor Piot said this a lot.
“You need some money for the ticket?”
“No, no,” Neil said. “I mean, I’m not sure—”
“Take this,” Professor Piot said, pushing more than several twenty-euro bills across the table. “You can give them back in August. In fact, while you are there I have one small errand in Vilnius for you to do.”
So Neil found himself walking back to Professor Piot’s office to check the departure times for the all-night bus to Vilnius, because Professor Piot insisted that if Neil waited until morning he would never go. Neil was trying to think of some way to get out of the whole thing without disappointing Professor Piot, when he remembered about the pizza restaurant. He could find her that way. Professor Piot took out his phone and started dialing, and before Neil could tell him it really wasn’t necessary, Professor Piot was saying, “Kazys, old man!” and making all the arrangements. And while Professor Piot was talking, Neil remembered the light brush of Magdalena’s fingers along the side of his face, the way she kept taking her glasses off when he looked at her.
Professor Piot hung up the phone. “Okay, so they will expect you,” he said. “Fine people, Kazys and his wife, and as I remember they have a fold-out couch.” He wrote down their address and told Neil he was giving him three days off work in exchange for tracking down a certain file at the Lithuanian archives.
“Something about the Tour Saint-Jacques?” Neil asked while Professor Piot searched through the sticky notes on his desk, looking for the number of the file.
“No, no,” Professor Piot said. “This is a new project, one that came to me by way of a Jewish group here in Paris. They would like to learn more about a certain cemetery in Vilnius. An apartment complex is going up, and it appears that the spot was once an important burial place from the time when Vilnius was a great center for Jewish learning.”
“What do you want me to look for?” Neil asked.
“A little thing. I’ll go myself in the autumn, but while you are there you can get this—” he gave Neil a sticky note with numbers written on it “—at the Lithuanian State Historical Archives. I believe this is the founding document of the cemetery, a charter from the Polish king allowing the Jews the right to burials outside the city walls, but there has been some confusion about the date. Kazys has been promising for months he will check this for me, but then he goes abroad, and this and that. Frankly, I think there may be some politics involved. And Kazys—well, it can be a delicate subject. He may prefer to keep himself removed. Make sure you get photocopies.”
“Of course,” Neil said.
“Okay, so, give Kazys my regards,” Professor Piot said. “And have a good time.” He gave a big wink that Neil pretended not to see. Neil remembered too late that Professor Piot was not the most discreet person. By the next morning all the research assistants would probably have been told that Neil was off visiting his petite amie in Lithuania. But—who knew? By then it might be true.
{MAGDALENA}
Between Orléans and
Meung-sur-Loire, June
It was six days since they’d left Paris. Already nearly all of Magdalena’s euros were gone, the shoelaces she’d been using to carry the box with Lina’s ashes had broken, and most of the skin on her feet had been replaced by Band-Aids. Sometimes she and the others walked from town to town on little paths through fields of vegetables or in between planned forests of strange geometry, straight white poplars and birch planted neatly row on row with vines strung drunkenly between them. Other times they walked single file along the shoulder of the highway, where signs showed the towns still had French names for considerable distances ahead. She tried to ask the old man with the walking stick how far they were from Spain, but he couldn’t understand her, and neither could the nuns, who had started tearing off the ends of their sandwiches and giving them to Magdalena when they stopped for lunch.
Up till then Magdalena had kept her distance from the English speakers in their group, preferring not to get too close to the familiar words on arms and elbows and sunburned knees. But realizing that she would need someone to split the price of a bunk with her at the next hostel—either that or sleep outside—Magdalena let herself fall back behind the group a bit to walk with Rachel, who, Magdalena had noticed, also slipped pieces of bread into her pockets when they stayed the night at a place with free breakfast.
Rachel had been born and would die in Clapham and, though she claimed to be one of the pagans, she told anyone who would listen that she was counting on the saint at the end of the road to wipe away the particular sin of having started a son out in life with a heroin habit.
“What’s the box for?” Rachel asked her as they walked.
“My friend,” Magdalena said.
“Like a present?” Rachel said.
“No,” Magdalena said.